


Compromises

by CurseOfImmortality



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-13
Updated: 2019-09-09
Packaged: 2020-08-23 21:23:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20228068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CurseOfImmortality/pseuds/CurseOfImmortality
Summary: Peter tried to blink away the pungent gasoline, but his face was too much of a bloated, open sore; he could hardly move his eyelids. Blood clotted in his hair and his face, seeping in between the shredded mask and open wounds. It pooled in his mouth and clung to his skin, deathly cold.Is it over? Thank God.





	1. Need A Light

Gasoline.

He woke to gasoline pouring down his face.

Peter tried to blink away the pungent fluid, but his face was too much of a bloated, open sore; he could hardly move his eyelids. Blood clotted in his hair and his face, seeping in between the shredded mask and open wounds. It pooled in his mouth and clung to his skin, deathly cold.

He was tempted to drink it; his throat was so parched. It could almost have been water, flushing out the acrid, cottoned metal of blood. It even took some of the grime, dirt, and blood that had clung to him like a second skin.

But it burned lines of fire down his throat—it wasn’t water, no matter how much he wished it was. He choked weakly.

Voices were speaking, laughing, underwater. He couldn’t make any of it out, wasps buzzed and rung in his ears from endless beatings.

_Has it been days? Weeks?_

It felt like it.

“He’s still in there! Can ya believe it?”

Peter didn’t know how long he’d been there, caught in that dark basement. It must’ve been at least a few days—he’d been knocked unconscious or fallen asleep from exhaustion enough times that he’d lost track of the days in the darkness. In the pain and fog, the days before the Basement were like a hazy dream—he couldn’t remember how he’d gotten there, or even how he’d lived before. Only his dreams were a refuge, dreams that he was back with the Decathlon team, or just with Aunt May. Ned. MJ. Tony.

A boot crunched against his already broken ribs. Peter barely wheezed.

“Still got a little life in you, hmm? Good. That’ll keep it satisfying.”

_Tony._

Last Peter remembered was being dragged out from the Basement and rung on the head with a crowbar. There was cold asphalt underneath him now, and the stars were shining above—peaking out from the spire shapes of buildings and brickwork.

Years ago, Mr. Stark had been on the news. He’d been captured in Afghanistan, trapped with nothing but a box of scraps, and emerged a new man—Iron Man shed from the shell of Tony Stark. But there was no fire in Peter’s bones tonight. There was no rebirth for Spider-Man. His body refused to move, too cold and bled out; his muscles too worn from days of abuse.

The sounds of pouring gas quieted. Even the laughter died down as boots stepped away, almost reverently.

_…It is over? _

There was the growling rumble of a revving engine.

“Scream for me, will ya?”

A flash of light. A match was struck.

_Thank God._

The whoosh of flames was deafening.

*

Michelle knew that something was terribly wrong.

Dread pooled in her stomach like cold motor oil. Peter hadn’t been in school for almost a week now. He’d missed everything. Every class, every decathlon meeting—even lunch. His empty desk near the front of AP Chem haunted in the periphery every day. She kept expecting him to come stumbling into their decathlon meeting with another lame excuse of having gone for vacation without bringing his phone like last time. Maybe even a sudden business trip because of his “Stark Internship”.

She’d take anything, really. She’d take any of his crap excuses if it meant at least that _someone _had heard from him.

But each day came and went, and the seats stood empty—drawing more and more concerned glances from students and teachers alike.

It wasn’t the first time that Peter ghosted everyone for an extended time. He’d had changed after the Blip, turned out quieter, almost withdrawn. It was no secret that Peter had been really attached to Tony Stark and Tony’s death had really affected him.

They must’ve been closer than she’d thought. God knows, if Peter really was just an intern, how he could’ve known Tony well enough to take his death that hard. CEO’s generally don’t even see interns. Was it just a case of hero worship?

Peter ghosting everyone could have been normal, maybe. If it weren’t for the fact that Ned was steadily becoming more of a nervous wreck by the day. He was getting steadily paler, almost sickly, and developing a habit of nervously checking his phone every three seconds.

It was lunch period when she finally slammed her books on their usual lunch table, startling Ned’s from his reverie.

“Where—“, Michelle paused, thinking of how to put this lightly, “—the _fuck. _Is. Peter?”

Okay, she was pissed.

Because the last time Peter vanished off the face of the earth and Ned looked like this was when Spider-Man had jumped onto an alien _space _donut_._

And flown off to _Titan_.

To go fight _Thanos_.

_On his f--ing own._

Okay. _Almost _on his own. But still. Something was wrong and she was sick of Ned’s bullshit excuses.

“L-Look, MJ, I told you, he’s sick—”

Michelle reached across the table and pulled him half away across the desk by his collar.

“_Cut. The. Crap. _I swear, if you bullshit me _one more time_, I’m going to rip your guts out and wear them for stockings. No one has heard from Parker for _days_, Ned. No calls. No texts. _Nothing_.”

The sad, empty void that was Peter’s usual spot bothered her a lot more than it should. Who cared if a nerd disappeared from school for a few days? No one. No one except Ned. And her.

Because, as much as she hated to admit, Peter was her friend, damnit. She could count the number of friends she’d had in her lifetime on one hand. And there was no way in hell she was going let this loser disappear on her _again_.

“—been gone. No one’s seen her since the Snap. And Peter’s been going crazy looking—”

“Wait. Who’s gone?” He’d spilled the beans faster than she could keep up.

“It’s May, Peter’s aunt May’s been gone—Peter’s been going to the Reunion Center every day to see if anyone has found her—”

_May?_

Michelle felt herself sitting down on the lunch bench heavily, her mind awhirl.

It’d only been a few days since Tony Stark’s funeral, and the world was still struggling to recover from the massive disruption of having basically doubled its population overnight. Many people were still out on the streets looking for their families and tearful reunions were pretty much everywhere; and there were many others were still missing in the aftermath of the Blip.

It was more than likely that Aunt May was still somewhere out there, displaced by the mess that was the Blip. But she was also all Peter had left. Michelle wouldn’t at all be surprised if he was spending his days turning New York upside down looking for her.

“Since everyone came back?…How come no one knew?”

Ned sighed, “Peter didn’t want anyone to know…”

Michelle rolled her eyes so hard it hurt. _Of course. _“So, where is he now?”

“That’s the thing, MJ…I don’t know. He hasn’t responded to me in three days. I’ve been calling, texting; I even emailed him! He said on Monday he’d be right back, but he never did…" 

Peter, missing? She tried not to think about the many murder mystery documentaries she’d binged watched last summer; it _really _wasn’t helpful, but if he’d already been missing for three days, then every day did count.

Monday. Peter had skipped Decathlon then too, and rushed out early from AP Chem, calling in sick. She had about a billion questions. Where was he going before he disappeared? Did he rush about because he heard something about May? Why wouldn’t he have told Ned? What had he gone out for, and what happened to him?

Who did Parker even think he was, going out snooping for clues on his own?

She eyed Ned. Well, that was probably the easiest one to answer, actually. But if she was going to get that answer, she wanted to hear it from the nerd himself, not from Ned.

Michelle stood up and headed for the door.

“Wait, MJ! Where are you going?” She was already half way out the cafeteria by the time Ned regained his senses.

“To the Reunion Center. Duh,” she said, fiddling with her phone, _Hey nerds. Decathlon meeting is cancelled today_. She set it to Do Not Disturb before slipping it into her pocket to forestall the outraged spam she was inevitably going to get from the rest of the team.

“Wait, wait! I’ll come!”

*

_“—news today, sightings of what seems like a Stark suit patrolling Manhattan airspace—”_

_“—extremists in Syria have obtained what appears to be alien weaponry—”_

Michelle put her head down, tuning out the multiple screens were displaying the latest news cycle in the Anthony Edward Stark Blip Reunion Center, as she scanned the long series of posters of names and faces. In typical stupid government fashion, they’d had to wait in a long line to even receive a queue number and then wait even longer to have that number called.

“—_has __taken the name ‘Iron Mom’ as has been popularized on the internet—_”

So, they’d opted to look through the pages and pages of missing persons posters thumb-tacked to the announcement cork boards.

William Baker. Sam Smith. John Walker. Javelle Anderson. Sarah Sun. The list went on and on, seemingly endless. Michelle and Ned sorted through the piles and piles of missing persons searching for May Parker—_would there be something for Peter? _But it turned out unsurprisingly fruitless. 

Michelle held back a sigh; they were just burning time at this point.

Even if they found May’s poster, what then? There was no telling if there would be anything useful on it, most of the papers were stock printed with just identifying information and a phone number to call. Ned had already given up and was sitting down by the waiting chairs, thumbing through his phone—maybe there was some hint Peter had given him of where he’d gone before he went missing. 

Michelle kept silently leafing through the papers, maybe there wasn’t anything they could do—but something was better than nothing.

It was hours later when their number was finally called; Ned jumped to their assigned booth number, Michelle just a step behind.

“Can I help you?” It was an elderly woman at the desk, white hair and crinkles from smiles.

“Um, we’re looking to see if anyone has found anything about May Parker?” Ned asked.

The woman frowned and tapped away at the keyboard, “I’m sorry, but what is your relation to her? I’m afraid I’m not allowed–“

“Oh, uh, I’m Ned Leeds, her nephew’s best friend! Peter, Peter Parker.” Ned said, visibly getting nervous as the woman gave him a decidedly unimpressed look, “and, um, and this is Michelle Jones, she’s uh—she’s Peter’s girlfriend!”

Michelle jerked to stare incredulously at Ned and flushed, fighting her keep her expression earnest when the lady turned eyes to her. Peter’s _girlfriend?_She kept her clenched fists in the folds of her jacket, feeling her heart thumping loud enough for everyone in the room to hear. _There’s a dumpster just around the corner. No one is going to find the body, Ned. I swear._

“—and yeah we’re just asking for Peter because he’s been _so _worried and—"

“—oh my goodness! You know, I just met Peter the other day, and you two look like such a cute couple.” The woman was gushing, looking aglow at Michelle as Ned wove his net of lies and half-truths.

Michelle felt her face glowing, her and Peter—a cute couple? Her knees wobbled a little at the thought. No, no, they were just friends—this was just an act, she’s not obsessed. 

“Oh, really? When did he stop by? I haven’t heard from my, um, my _boyfriend_, since Monday. We’ve been worried sick.” She murmured.

Oh _God_, she couldn’t even look at this woman in the eye.

This was a dumpster fire, she had no idea how Ned got them into this—but she was going to kill him.

“Since Monday? And you haven’t seen him since? Goodness! I’m so sorry that you two have had to go through this. I believe Peter came by asking about his aunt this Monday as well. And I know it’s very difficult especially for children your age to deal with things like this. You know, in _my _day—"

Monday. Peter had come here on Monday after disappearing from class.

But this was the first time Ned had been at the Reunion Center and he’d made no mention of the fact that Peter had come here before. Did Ned know? Why would Peter go anywhere without letting his best friend know?

The rest of the conversation goes by rather unhelpfully, the woman hasn’t seen Peter since then and there’s no word at all about May. But it’s a start and Michelle can’t help but feel a little thrilled that maybe, _just maybe_, they might be picking up a trail on Peter. 

Even if their first clue is nothing but a dead end, the focusing on the mystery is a helpful distraction while she recovers from her earlier near heart attack. It’s almost enough for Michelle to forgive Ned for throwing her under the bus. Almost.

But it’s just past five now and the Center is closing, and it’s two hours since school let out. Thankfully, Mom isn’t going to be home for a few more hours still, so there probably won’t be any awkward questions about where she went off to, but she can’t stay out too much longer. Someone’s got to start dinner so it can be ready by the time she’s done with her shift. 

Ned and Michelle don’t have the faintest clue of where to look next, so they part ways, “Later, loser”, and head home to mull over what they’ve learned. It’s only after she gets off the bus at her closest stop home that she remembers to check her phone for the slew of texts from the Decathlon team. 

It’s mostly just Flash alternating between whining and celebrating that practice is cancelled, some notes of concern from Cindy that they’re not practicing when it’s only a month out from regionals…and Flash calling Peter out for missing school again.

The urge to shut him down over their group chat tests Michelle’s restraint; she reminds herself that no one else knows that Peter’s actually missing and potentially in danger, not just blowing them all off.

_Flash: PENIS_

_Flash: HEY PENIS_

_MJ: Yes Flash, we know it’s hard to find yours. We don’t need the reminders._

She hesitates over the phone, wondering if she should say anything about Peter, or even just about May. But she can’t figure out to words to say without feeling intrusive, would Peter want her to say anything? Worry wars with uncertainty and insecurity—_what if he just shows up tomorrow? Would he be mad at me if I said something about his aunt?—_so she just slips her phone away without a word.

The sun hangs low in the sky by the time she steps foot in their apartment, gilding the grungy streets outside gold and lavender in the hazy light. _Air pollution_, she is tempted to scoff—but the light is arresting as it streams in through the windows along the hall and illuminating her home in a soft, golden light.

Something aches in her chest at the sight, that has her fishing around her pockets for her phone to try to capture the moment. Something about the light, looking out over the scattered and torn-down buildings left to decay in the aftermath of the Snap, awash in gold and glory, that makes her _long _for something she can’t quite put words to.

It’s over all too soon, the golden light fades a little and the magic of the moment disappears; she comes back to her senses, slipping her shoes off at the door, and pads to the kitchen. 

There isn’t much in the fridge, just some eggs, milk, cremini mushrooms, two zucchinis and a fillet of salmon in the freezer. But she finds a half-emptied box of gluten free spaghetti and a few canned tomatoes in the pantry to go along with it.

The exercise of cooking is relaxing, almost meditative; she never thought that it would ever become a thing—Michelle Jones, cooking? It was positively _domestic_. But if she was going to have to do something pretty much every night of the week, she was going to do it _well_.

With the salmon defrosting in a bowl of warm water in the sink, Michelle salts the pasta water and sets it on the stove to boil while she starts slicing up the zucchinis.

If there was anyone who would’ve known about Peter’s stop at the Reunion Center on Monday, it would have been Ned. So, why was Ned so surprised to find out that Peter had been there? Michelle’s eyes narrow as she accidentally slices the cutting board along with the vegetables—had he already known, but played dumb because of their secrets? Was he just playing her?

_No_, she decides; she’s being paranoid. Ned doesn’t have a deceptive bone in his body, the two losers are terrible at hiding anything at all, much less try to play something like this off.

Besides, Peter is missing.

She can’t help biting her lip in worry at the thought. His safety is too big of a deal to be playing games like that. Whatever this is, whatever happened to him—this is serious.

She dumps the pasta into the now boiling water and cracks black pepper and Himalayan pink salt before slipping the salmon onto a heated cast iron with some oil. It sizzles and crackles as the layer of spices start to form a crust and she takes a moment to season the other side likewise.

She tries not to think of the dismal statistics—how many people who go missing who are never found again. Especially with the chaos from losing _half the population of the human race_and then having them suddenly returned. Would anyone really care if another person was missing? There were already pages and pages of missing persons reports, would anyone stop to look for one more? 

The door cracks open, breaking her from her spiraling thoughts,

“Hey honey—“

“Hey mom.”

“—What’s cookin’?—”

Michelle shrugs from behind the counter, “Pasta. Just whatever we have left in the fridge.” She turns and freezes, _crap_, she forgot to even start the sauce. The can opener comes out and two cans of tomatoes are start sizzling on another pan. 

Her mom smiles and her words float into the kitchen as she steps into her bedroom, “I’ll be right there, honey. Let me get these scrubs off first.”

“Take your time!”, Michelle responds back as her ten-minute timer goes off, the noodles are done. She dumps the boiling pasta mixture into a colander and preps a heated pan to grill the zucchinis and mushrooms together with olive oil and garlic.

The salmon is flipped to reveal the pleasing brown of a seared crust. There’s no butter, else she would put in a pat now just to catch the smoke flavors, but a touch more oil works instead. The tomatoes need more time to break down properly, but it’s time they don’t have. So, she just finishes the sauce—salt, sugar, pepper, garlic, thyme, oregano, and a splash of red wine.

It’s done, but the flavors need time on the hot stove to develop, and the alcohol needs time to burn off. 

“Need any help?” The sound of water and clanking dishes coming from the kitchen sink snaps Michelle out of her trance. Mom is at the dish washer, rinsing plates and sliding them in.

“Just the setting the table, I think.”

Mom slides the colander across the counter to her, “Don’t forget to oil the pasta. Do you still need these?” She motions to the array of spices laid out on the countertop. Oops.

“No, we’re okay,” she says with as straight a face as she can manage.

Mom helps her put the things away and trudges over to set the table while Michelle mixes the cooling pasta with olive oil. The sound of clinking silverware and bubbling sauce fills the silent kitchen. It’s an uncomfortable silence, she tries not to think about where Peter could be now. Whether he’s dead. Or how he should be at home with Aunt May enjoying dinner too, instead of desperately searching for the last person in the world who could be a mother to him.

Guilt swirls acidly in her belly. Should she say something? How can she just pretend that nothing is wrong?

“So, how was your day?” Michelle hears herself asking, instead.

Small talk. Ugh. But she can’t help Peter, not yet at least, and she can’t tell anyone the truth. They don’t know anything about where he is, he could be across the Atlantic right now even—maybe contacting whatever Avengers remain after the Blip. She doesn’t even know if he really even is Spider-Man.

Would she just end up exposing him if she said something now?

Her mom just sighs, “It was okay. A lot happened, more patients came into the ward from surgery today.” She smiles slyly, “We had another patient who needed to be turned, but really didn’t want to be. 

Michelle grimaces, she really doesn’t need another graphic description about what happens when hospital patients who can’t move also don’t accept being turned. She learned how to appreciate morbidity from her mom; but hearing about how human skin sublimates under constant pressure isn’t morbid—it’s just gross.

“It was good. My day, I mean.” She decides, responding to her mom’s unasked question, “Regionals are coming up in about a month, and we’re trying to get ready for that. None of us are really worried though.”

With the table set, Michelle serves dinner and they sit to eat. Mom asks about her classes, how Liz and Betty are doing. She dodges around the fact that the Decathlon team _didn’t_, in fact, meet today. That her friend is missing. That she ditched school to go looking for him.

Small talk. It’s all small talk. _Hypocrite. Liar. _Her gut roils from guilt and worry. Somewhere out there, Peter is missing and in trouble.

It’s an intricate dance of pretending everything is okay, when it really isn’t, and talking to avoid really talking. Michelle usually isn’t the one to peddle crap (to lie), but the truth feels stuck in her throat and she’s choking around it. She guides the conversation away from herself towards Mom, or about her female friends, about college applications, about anything, really.

But Mom circles her like a shark smelling blood; she blocks Michelle’s attempt to pry the conversation from her hands, and deftly redirects questions back to her instead. It’s then that Michelle realizes that for all her reputation at school for being terrifyingly sharp at turning conversations on people and sniffing out secrets, she’d had to learn it from somewhere—namely, her mom. And her mother has decades more experience on her.

“So, how’s Peter?”, Mom asks out of the blue, with a sly smile.

Michelle chokes, feeling her stomach drop out, as a mouthful of spaghetti suddenly goes down the wrong pipe—she reaches for the water.

“He seems like a nice boy. When are you going to bring him home to meet me, hmm?”

“MOM!”

*

Michelle groans at the end of sixth period as the memory of that horrifying dinner conversation surfaces, unbidden. Thankfully, her mother had interpreted her uneasiness as her having a crush on Peter Parker, which she _did not_, in fact, _have_.

She complained about Parker.

She was worried for Parker.

She wanted to punch him in the face and drop him from the Decathlon team, Parker.

But, no, she did _not _have a crush on Peter Parker.

The bell rings and there is a mad rush for the door as dozens of students make a run to be the first one out of school, heedless of their teacher’s shouts for order. Even in a nerd school like this, no one wants to stay a moment longer in class than they have to be. Except for her particular brand of nerd-losers who insisted that there be Decathlon practice today in preparation for their upcoming competition.

Everyone is a nerd in this school. Not everyone gets the title of loser, however.

It’s still a month out and they steamrolled the regional competition last year. But _still_, they want to spend a few more extra hours after class to perfect their nerd-crushing technique. Michelle can’t decide if she feels proud of her band of merry losers for their devotion to sadism or disappointed in their lack of having a life. 

Normally, a few extra hours of smacking down Flash Thompson and watching Parker make an awkward mess of himself wouldn’t be a problem, it’s almost therapy. But today, she wants nothing more than to head down again to the city center to go look for clues for what might’ve happened to her friend.

“Any leads?”, Leeds—hah—whispers as he sidles up to the side of locker as she does the usual exchange in preparation for their meetings. He looks at her oddly when she huffs in amusement, but she shakes her head. Parker must be getting to her if she’s making bad puns to herself already. 

“No, nothing. I couldn’t find anything on the street recording you sent me,” she admits, “I haven’t had the chance to go through all of it yet, but there’s nothing so far.”

She’d been very impressed and admittedly a little scared of how easily Ned had hacked the government servers and pulled down the recordings of the street cams around their area. This nerd was scarier than she thought, but all hail the technological incompetence of their Big Brother overlords if it was going to work in their favor. 

Anyways, without any clues of where to look just yet, Michelle can’t quite justify ditching her own team tonight just yet.

Maybe they’ll find something tonight. Or tomorrow. She can’t help but worry—the trail is already three, no, _four _days cold now. Peter’s absence from class hung heavy over her and the rest of the team. Even with his reputation as a flake, this was much longer than usual for him. Peter was one of their own; him being missing for this long was making everyone uneasy.

Ned and Michelle collectively breathed a weary sigh.

“MJ, I’m just…I’m just really worried about him, you know? It’s not usually like this.”

Michelle just eyes him silently as they walk down the corridor to their usual room.

“Peter…he gets himself in trouble all the time. And I know that he’s strong, and he’s smart. It’s always worked out in the past, but I can’t help but feel like…like,” Ned pauses to swallow a shaky breath, “like one day, he’ll bite off more than he can chew or, just, get himself in over his head, you know?”

“…I guess I’m just worried. That something happened him.” Ned finishes, looking uncomfortable, like there’s a twenty pound rock of secrets stuck in his chest that he’s trying to cough out.

“I’m worried too,” she admits.

“You are?”

“Yeah. I’m worried about when Parker is going to finally show up, so I drop him from the Team for skipping so many freaking meetings,” she fronts with a smirk. 

Ned laughs and she chuckles alongside him, but both of them can’t help feeling a little cold, hollow.

She’s tempted to tell him that it’s going to be okay, that they’ll find Peter. But the words feel like ash in her mouth. It would be a lie, she knows, and she doesn’t know how long she can keep juggling these lies.

It’s the same old song and dance with the Decathlon team. More anxious looks at Peter’s empty desk, but no one says anything—except for Flash who is quickly shut down by everyone else. Something about Peter’s radio silence rubs everybody the wrong way, it’s no longer a laughing matter but one that no one is willing to admit.

The flash cards come out, and Michelle has them broken up into teams to go through their regular practices. She’s been too frazzled lately to have properly prepared on-the-spot drills for the team, so she had everyone come prepared with something beforehand.

Crowd-sourcing. Such a joy. 

In between the rapid back and forth of questions and answers and a room full of squabbling teenagers, Michelle almost feels at home, like everything is okay. It’s step back to normal in a world where _normal_is honestly so rare. But the moment is almost too brief, broken when Flash suddenly screams and drops his laptop—when did he get his laptop out?

“—OH MY _GOD—”_

The room bursts into a flurry activity as chairs are moved around and the students rush to crowd around him; there are similar expressions of horror. Michelle hesitates around the bend of her desk, feeling acid and dread welling up in her throat. 

Does she really want to see? Somehow, she knows that she really doesn’t. This, whatever _this _is, will change everything, it will _break _everything. Once Pandora’s Box is open, there’s no putting back the horrors back.

She makes it anyways. Betty and Cindy protest as Michelle shoves her head through the pack of crowding students—

_Oh. Oh God._

The footage is grainy, but there’s no mistaking that it’s the live feed of Spider-Man—who, she dimly realizes, also hasn’t been seen in a few days.

It’s dark, almost black, but in the hazy lights, she can see him, hanging, crucified in a mockery of an entomologist’s bug collection, pinned with stakes through the elbows and knees into a wall.

They’re doing…doing _something _to him. The sounds of drills and of hammers and screams and laughter mix, bleeding from the distorted audio. There’s blood. There’s blood _everywhere_and _bone_.

She can’t see. The crowd of voices sound like rushing water. Everything is blurry and she stumbles—

_Oh God. Oh God, Peter._

She’s in the bathroom, there’s a toilet; she hears herself upend her lunch. Acid is burning up her throat, the floor is spinning around her. It’s hot, it’s so cold. Her face is wet, there’s a _thunk_.

The marble-white seat mocks her; she sees more of her lunch come up again.

_Peter._

Blood. Blood and bone.

_“Oh my God, MJ, are you okay?”_

Someone is shaking her, then holding her hair up as the last of her lunch comes up again. The cold, white seat is blurry; heat streaks down her face, she touches it and her hands come away wet. Her throat is swollen, she can’t swallow; she can’t speak.

Arms wrap around her from behind, steadying her.

It’s Ned, she realizes belatedly. But there’s too much heat in between her eyes, and she can’t find it in her to turn to face him properly. Her sweater sleeves sop up her eyes instead.

_“Was that…Was that Peter_?_” _She chokes out. She has to know. She doesn’t want to know.

She waits, hoping, praying that Ned would burst out laughing at her and throw it in her face, at even the suggestion; how _ridiculous_.

She's never so desperately wishedto be so utterly_ wrong_ in her life.

But Ned just shakes, taking a trembling breath, and nods. He’s crying too, she realizes.

They’re a mess, it’s a wreck. She doesn’t know how long they sit there on the filthy tiles. But the world feels broken, tilted askew, in a dream without gravity.

Her friend. _Peter. _She can barely wrap her mind it.

Michelle isn’t a praying woman, but she feels desperate and helpless. Her hands tangle in her hair. The bathroom stall is filthy, but it still feels like a confessional, the kind that maybe this world deserves; this world so _filthy_, so _broken_; this world that is so _wrong_, that takes away everything beautiful that she has ever known.

_God. Come back to us, Peter._

_God. Please, bring him back to us._


	2. True Colors

_This might just be the stupidest idea I’ve ever had_, Michelle reflects, as the prison shutters slam shut behind her.

Hindsight is always 20/20.

Cold sweat drips down her back as she follows the correctional officer down the dingy hallways of Queensboro Correctional Facility. Time seems to slow, seconds barely ticking by as they make their way around the corridors. Michelle nervously rubs her clammy palms down the sides of her jeans.

This is stupid. She has no idea how she’d convinced herself how anything good could come out of this.

But what choice do any of them have? She shoves down the urge to run, to back out.

Her friends need her. _Peter _needs her. And no one seems to have a clue where he is.

The whole world had gone insane since the video. It had only taken about twenty minutes for the video to be pulled down and the account banned for content violations. But whatever the live stream had displayed before it’d gotten dropped was now being endlessly replayed everywhere on the news and all over the internet.

Everyone, it seemed, was looking for Spider-Man. The entire city, and increasingly the state of New York, was being flooded with drones of every kind; an armada of Iron Suits and flying scanners had blanketed the city within hours of the video breaking out.

Even several stories underground, she could still hear the rumbling of jet engines roaring overhead, like ocean tides crashing against a cliffside.

Because if there was anyone who could track down something from the internet, it would be Mrs. Potts.

_And if the Iron Suits looking _here_, in New York, then, there’s still hope._

She could still do something.

They stop outside a featureless door and the guard motions her inside. She grips the doorknob and hesitates. 

Last chance.

But the memory of the video floats up to the front of her mind instead, the scratchy audio having turned endlessly in her mind for days at a time. This is crazy. But she doesn’t have an army of search machines, she’s got to work with what she’s got.

She shoves the door open harder than strictly necessary.

Florescent lights snap on as she crosses the threshold and, there, on the other side of the thick bulletproof glass, a bald muscle-bound man sits chained to an iron chair.

Adrian Toomes.

He looks older than she remembers; deep wrinkles had settled into cold, calculating eyes peering out from a white dusting of facial hair, dark scars littering his neck and arms. Even older, chained down, and on the other side of bulletproof glass, the man was still incredibly imposing.

Whatever half improvised words she had prepared quickly die in her throat.

There’s no telling how this will go, Michelle hadn’t interacted much with Liz’s dad before he’d been sentenced to federal prison. And she was used to intimidating high school nerds, not convicted felons. 

She restrains the urge to fidget under his stare.

“I know you,” he squints, almost ponderously.

“Michelle,” the crack in her voice betrays her, “I used to come by to visit Liz all the time.” Does he remember?

He hums.

“You look like shit.”

_Well, he’s not wrong_. She can’t remember the last time she got a good night’s sleep. 

“What do you want?”

She hesitates, how much does he know about Peter being Spider-Man? She isn’t even sure how he would feel about the hero who put him in prison. Probably not the warm and fuzzies.

“I—I’m looking for my friend,” she decides, “Peter. Peter Parker.”

She watches him suddenly still, jaw clenched. Ominous.

“He’s in…a lot of trouble,” she admits, carrying on heedless of the blaring warning signs, _he has to help_.

She doesn’t know what she would do if he doesn’t.

“He’s been missing for almost a week now and they…they’ve got him.” Is that too much to admit? She’s not sure how much of the outside world the prison allows its prisoners to see, whether Toomes would connect the dots. Whether she really wants giving _Vulture_, of all people, more hints to Spider-Man’s identity.

“And,” comes the rumble, “what the hell makes you think I would even want to help find your boyfriend?”

She scowls, because that’s the thing, isn’t it? If it’s just Peter, why would Toomes care about a high schooler? And if Spider-Man, why would he help the man who put him in federal prison?

“Because Liz brought me here. Because she thought you could help,” she decides, “because she thought you were still the man who raised her to treat the people you consider family the right way.”

She really only had one card to play coming in here.

There’s a moment of tense silence when the man seems to deliberate, but it’s suddenly broken when he laughs in her face, a sudden roar that tips his head back, allowing her to see the cameras in the room behind him.

She flushes in humiliation, _what a piece of—_

“What a _shocker_,” he spits, shadows pouring over his face until she can only see his cold eyes staring at her, “you think you can barge in here, say my daughter’s name, and think I’m going to roll over for you like some kind of dog?”

“You think this is about you? You think I care?” she’s standing, she realizes belatedly, fists clenched, “people are _dying_. They’re kidnapping and _torturing _people. Peter is just one of them.”

She doesn’t know that, she doesn’t where she’s going with this—but there’s a deadly heat welling up in her chest, and she wants to vomit because it _burns _from the inside out.

“Liz always said that you raised her up—”

“—Kid. Just because you’d _come to our place and play nerd trivia _with my daughter doesn’t mean you know shit about the world—”

“—I told her that maybe you were still the father she knew, but I guess we were both wr—”

“_Shut up, girl. _You think you can play games with me?” He was _mad_, on his feet, trying to tower above her with arms still bolted to the chair, but his eyes—his eyes were still dispassionately cold.

She shuts up when the chair snaps from where it’s bolted to the ground as the man rights himself. Because Adrian Toomes tearing apart metal bolts with his bare hands is terrifying.

There’s a commotion in the room behind him, yelling and thumping boots; the knob on the door starts rattling.

Toomes glances back at it and then at her. Something in his expression softens.

“Use your head, kid. There’s a lotta people out there just watching us—"

A swarm of darkly dressed men, _correctional __officers_, burst through the door in a swarm of armored sleeves and rubber boots. Toomes grunts as they shove his face to the ground and cuff his hands behind his back. 

“—This one’s got a future—" he grunts, barely audible above the clamor of thudding boots and yelling men.

“Wait! Stop it—!”

It was too soon, damn it; he’d _just _started saying something, but Michelle doesn’t have to chance to say anything else before she’s dragged out of the room and politely kicked out of the facility.

*

“Well,” Ned says with a shrug, “it was worth a shot.”

Michelle grumbles darkly around the edges of her _lumpia_, she’d been so _close_.

They’d somehow found themselves congregated at Peter’s place. It’d been an odd, sort of accidental decision. Michelle had never been to the Parker’s, had never known that she’d wanted to go, but in their common frustration at the dead ends finding their missing friend—they’d found themselves drifting toward Peter’s apartment complex, ostensibly to see if they could find any more clues.

It wasn’t hard getting in. Ned was such a regular presence that Aunt May had decided he was part of their family now, the informal adoption sealed with him getting a copy of the house keys. But instead of comforting, the apartment was eerily silent; it was uncomfortable being there with no one home_._

She tries not to think of it as haunted.

They’d quickly stepped to Peter’s room, the rest of the house feeling too threatening to wander, toeing around the haphazard mess of gadgets, science pun T-shirts and half-built Lego projects scattered around the room. Ned switches on some of the improvised yellow Christmas lights, casting the room in a warm glow, and plays something through the speakers—the low strumming and plucking of a guitar and soft vocals.

_Hipster music_, she grouches. But it’s good, comforting even.

The room still felt warm, lived in, and it wasn’t long before Michelle found herself splayed out on the mattress, munching on snacks, with Ned at Peter’s desk going through his laptop.

She avoids Ned’s occasional suspicious side-eye as she crunches on another lumpia and burrows her face into a pillow.

It was warm and comfy, okay? The closest thing the room had to a sofa.

“Any other insanely ballsy ideas? Because, seriously, that was really badass.”

Michelle does her best not to preen as she sits up in bed. “If I did,” she shoots back, “would you actually come this time? Or am I the one that’s always going to have the pants in this relationship?”

Ned chortles, but continues tapping away at the keys, conspicuously avoiding a reply.

Coward.

Her fingers dangle down to the snack bowl, only to come up empty. _Damn_, she’d pretty much eaten all of it. Mrs. Leeds officially makes the best study snacks ever.

Coming up with a twelve-step plan to convince Mrs. Leeds to teach her how to make _lumpia _remains a welcoming distraction from the sounds of thrusters and jet engines roaring past the apartment complex every few minutes.

“I don’t have anything, Leeds. Whatever you’ve got there on Parker’s laptop is probably the best thing we’ve got left,” she says with a sigh, flopping limply to her back. It’s surprisingly comfy.

She doesn’t know when it happens, only that at some point she’d made herself into a burrito with the comforter and sheets.

Ned nods distractedly as he continues scanning through Peter’s personal files, notes, and emails.

“I’ll let you know if I find something.”

Michelle takes a deep steadying breath as the smell of _Peter_, not that she would know what he smells like, no, not at all, wafts from the sheets enveloping her. Under the covers, thoughts of what might be happening to Peter come unbidden, something coils inside as she clenches the sheets and tries to focus on anything else—drowning in her worry about what _might _be happening really wasn’t helpful right now.

But no matter how much she tries to avoid thinking about it, she can’t help remembering Peter chained up and nailed to a wall, with the sounds of drills and hammers.

It’s hard to sleep. It’s hard to do _anything_, really.

She never really understood why girls her age bothered with makeup. But she gets it now. After the first time her mother pulled her aside, demanding to know what was wrong. But there’s only so much foundation and her shaky grasp of cosmetics can cover the increasingly dark circles around her eyes and hands that can’t seem to stop trembling.

Not to attract attention but rather to pretend. To keep pretending everything is fine, that she can look in the mirror and still think she’s holding it together when everything seems so bent on just falling apart.

_Stahp._

She buries her face into the comforter and takes a deep breath—old memories from what felt like a lifetime ago rise to the surface, memorizing flash cards together at Starbucks, joking around at team meetings, lunches spent eavesdropping on Peter and Ned bouncing nerd jokes like a tennis match. Sketching in the detention room. Watching Peter disappear on Homecoming night.

It’s warm, and cozy. Michelle realizes belatedly that she’s been running on nothing more than adrenaline and liberal amounts of espresso shots.

Liz. She should text her. She can’t remember where her phone is, and her arms are heavy.

Toomes. He was trying to say something before they took him out, she frowns weakly into the comforter. Not much of it made sense, other than him laughing at her.

It’s getting dark. She’s more tired than she thought.

The last thing she remembers is hoping Peter is okay.

She dreams instead of cold eyes and twisting metal.

*

“MJ?”

Someone is shaking her. She groans into the blankets. “Wha—is it time for school already?” 

“MJ, it’s getting late. I’ve got to go back soon. You can stay here if you want, though.”

“Ungh?”

She rubs her eyes, feeling some clarity return to her foggy head.

It’s already near dusk, the last rays of the dying sunset filter in through Peter’s window. She rolls out of bed and Ned is already roaming the edge of room, piling everything that might be useful into his large backpack. 

No wonder that thing always weighs like a stack of bricks.

“You’re going to get scoliosis like that, you know.”

Ned snorts as he loads a case of web-shooter fluid cartridges and a soldering kit. “I figure that one of these days, they’ll come out with robotic replacements for all that stuff, you know? I could become part-android, wouldn’t that be awesome?”

“Ned—”

“Dude! I could be like—” Ned mocks a robotic handwave, “Hi, my name is Ned, I am the android sent by CyberLife.”

She snorts, “You _nerd_.”

She doesn’t have the energy for any more of a retort, not that she could follow that much anyways. Things are different now and it’s never more keenly felt than when they both wait for a comeback that never arrives.

“Sorry, I didn’t wake you up earlier, but,” he hesitates, “you looked like you needed it.”

That was probably true. 

“Yeah. I do feel a lot better,” she says, stretching. She tries not to think about how weird it is to wake up in Peter’s bed. They were friends, she’d slowly drifted from the edge of their lunch table into joining their regular discussions about various aspects of nerd-dom, even been invited to watch a few run-throughs of _Alien_, at her insistence really.

There was only so many Star Wars marathons she could read a book through, after all. But the _Snap _and Peter’s disappearance had broken whatever momentum their growing friendship had. It was different now, empty even.

But being here again was comforting. With her eyes closed to just the sound of tapping keys, it had almost felt right again. Normal.

“I’ve got to be home soon,” Ned reminds her. “My mom’s expecting me to make it back in time for dinner.” 

Michelle nods, trying to hide the growing sense of disappointment—her mother was out on a late-night shift tonight. She’d be alone, not that Ned knew, but the last thing she wanted to do was to ask even more of him and his family. The Leeds were good people.

Ned seems to sense her hesitation because he slips her the Parker house key. “Here. You can stay. If you want.”

She blinks slowly at him, palming the innocuous silver key.

“Well, I’ll see you tomorrow, I guess. No decathlon, right?” Ned says, turning away, a sad grimace on his face. Right. Peter was in danger. They had better things to do than practice nerd trivia; some things were more important than even college applications.

“—_come to our place and play nerd trivia—"_

“Wait.”

Michelle is suddenly halfway out the door, shoving him aside, eyes manic.

_His eyes. His eyes hadn’t moved._

“I have an idea.”

*

“You know, on the scale of badass-ness, I didn’t think you could one-up trying to interrogate _Vulture _of all people. But I think breaking into a protected _crime scene _which also happens to be _his house _is pretty up there.”

“_Shut up, Ned,” _Michelle whispers furiously into her earpiece as she slips hastily under the police line. “What are you getting from those cameras?”

“The place looks completely empty to me.”

The front door would no doubt be locked, so Michelle slips along the backyard. It’d been a long time since she’d been over at Liz’s, but she still remembers the time that Liz had locked herself out of her own house, right before the team was having a decathlon meet at her place.

Yup, the window on the detached kitchen by the swimming pool was still unlocked, so Michelle slides her hands—gloved, she’d watched enough Crime documentaries to be paranoid of leaving fingerprints anywhere—into the cracks on the windowsill and hefts the window back. Dust and bugs come skittering out, and she brushes them aside before crawling in.

There’s an access panel under the rug that led to the basement under the house.

“Dude…that is so sketch. And awesome.” Ned breathes out through the mics as she heaves the trap door open. “This is totally a super-secret super-villain lair. How did no one notice anything before?”

No one in the team had given any thought at the time as to why the Toomes had sketchy secret access tunnels to a hidden basement under the house. But that was _before _everyone had found out that Liz’s dad was secretly running an alien weapons smuggling ring.

In retrospect, it was stupidly obvious. Like, Parker-level stupid, but with how sweet Liz was and how supportive both her parents were, it was hard to see anything wrong with the family.

They’d all chalked it up to some rich person thing.

“Not that I’m doubting your super sleuthing instincts or anything, but…how do you know when you’ll have found…whatever you’re supposed to find?”

“I’ll know.”

The basement hallways are covered in a layer of dust that make her footprints stick out like the first snow of the year, but other than a couple empty crates holding rat and spiders, there is nothing remotely useful left. So, she follows the right wall all the way around to the drop-down stairs and pulls herself up into the house.

It’s a weird trip being back at Liz’s, every couple of rooms reminds her of long afternoons spent laughing, going through speed drills, and drowning in pizza. To her, it’d only be a year or two ago, maybe—but at least six years had passed since then; it felt like stepping into a memory, or a dusty old photograph.

It takes a long time, far longer than she expected really, before she stumbles across the library—made even longer by her having to put up with Ned running cheerful commentary the entire time. To be fair, it’s really hard to search for anything with how often she finds herself rolling her eyes at his antics.

“I swear to God, Ned, if you don’t stop eating those chips—”

“Mmph mphwhat?” He mumbles through the heavy _crunch _of potato chips chomped directly into the mic. He swallows, “what do you expect? I skipped dinner for this, mom was so pissed.”

It takes another few moments of searching before she finally spots what looks like, of course, a hollowed out Chitauri energy core sitting on the mantlepiece. Can this guy be any more obvious?

It takes Ned slurping noisily from a nearly empty soda cup for her to finally try ripping out an entire shelf in frustration, only for it to _click _before slowly sliding back into place. A small click echoes back down the hall.

Really? How many clichés is this guy going to give them?

“Wait, wait!” Ned shouts as she nearly pries the suddenly-there security box lid from the wall.

“What?” Did someone show up on the cams? She strains in the silence for the sound of footsteps.

“You can’t just open that! What if it’s booby-trapped? Dude, it’s totally—?

“Shut up, Ned,” she scoffs, rolling her eyes, “you really think Toomes would booby-trap his own home?”

“Of course, he would! He’s like a supervillain! And this is totally an evil lair—”

“He wouldn’t risk Liz or Liz’s mom getting hurt if they accidentally got to it,” she says with finality.

“It’s a TRAP!” Ned bursts out snickering on the other side of the mic.

Michelle rolls her eyes so hard it hurts.

She triple-checks the safe lid anyways. And ekes it out as slow as possible. Just in case. There wasn’t any chance of this being rigged with a bomb or trap or anything like that. Not at all.

And, sure enough, nothing blows up in her face as she gets it open and, behind the door, she just finds a smaller safe with just a simple numbered lock combination.

“Hey, Ned, check to see if—” It’s not Liz’s birthday.

“Yeah, I got in. It’s just—”

“How about—?”

It turns out to be Liz’s birthday mashed together with the last four digits of a social security number. Predictable.

“This is _so cool_,” Ned declares as she pops the door open.

“What, you guys have never done this before?”

“Uhhh, not really, it’s mostly just Peter looking for bad guys and beating them up. We don’t really do, like, uh—”

It’s just a small flip phone and a tiny metal stick, almost like a thumb drive, but not quite. A key? She holds down the phone’s power button, not expecting much, but it lights up with a little jingle—huh, quarter-battery. Even after all this time.

“Breaking and entering?”

“…yeah. That.”

She flips through the contacts really quickly, but there’s only two numbers on it, contacts “_S” _and “_T”._

“Wait, have _you_?”

She smirks and quickly shoves everything into her pockets. It’s another search for the needle in the haystack with Ned pestering her the entire time for the story of “MJ, when the hell did you break into someone’s house?”

“Not someone’s house,” is the mockingly delayed reply. Unsurprisingly, this doesn’t get him to stop prodding.

Nothing in the master bedroom responds to the key, which was a surprise. None of the other rooms in the house has anything that fits it either. She tries the refrigerator three separate times at Ned’s repeated insistence before realizing he’s _snickering _at her, not eating more chips.

She promises that if she can’t find out where this goes by the end of the day, she’ll show him where he can shove it.

It turns out that it belongs to a tiny slot in the basement, roughly the size of a USB port.

The wall slides back into an enormous hidden garage, revealing crates of glowing energy cores and hollowed out shells of weapon parts litter the ground, with bits and pieces of metal and chrome there and there mixed in with various strange looking gadgets and gizmos with whirring lights.

“_Holy. Sh—_”

And there, hanging above it all, in gleaming chrome and gunmetal, twin wings blanketed the ceiling from wall to wall on each side of a similarly dark metal armor.

The Vulture suit.

Michelle stands there, stunned. Pieces of conversation, loose thoughts whirling, strings and connections snapping together.

She fishes out the phone and pulls it to her ear.

This might just be enough.

“Who _the hell _do you think you are, calling from this number?”

“Hi, _Shocker._”

*

“No, MJ, you’ve had crazy ideas and I have no idea how we’ve gotten this far, but—”

“Ned, this is the _only chance _we’ve got—”

“I don’t _care_, MJ! This isn’t worth it!”

“_What_,” she says shoving him angrily, “you’re saying _Peter_’s not _worth it_?”

Ned freezes, and Michelle bites her lip in remorse. She’d gone too far, and they both knew it. This isn’t the way that she thought it would go down, standing just outside the shipping yard of their agreed meeting place half past midnight. 

Clutching half a crate’s full worth of alien energy cores, yelling at each other until they were red in the face.

“They’ve still got him, Ned,” she murmurs, staring down, trying to still her trembling hands. She feels tempted to just tip over; fear, exhaustion, grief, all wrapping up into one. “We can’t just _leave _him there.”

“You _know _that’s not what I’m saying,” Ned says quietly, with finality.

She does. She never meant to imply that Ned wasn’t as completely, totally committed to this as she was. She should apologize, Michelle realizes faintly, but her throat feels too caught up, swollen.

“Then what—?”

“There _has _to be another way.”

“Well, I don’t see another way,” the world goes blurry for a second and she clenches her eyes shut to keep the heat in. “Believe me, I would do it in a heartbeat if I did…but we need these guys, Ned. _Peter _needs someone on the inside looking for him. Someone they wouldn’t expect." 

“MJ—”

“I’m doing this.” She steps away from him, backing into the shipping yard before he can talk any more sense into her. Before he can remind her that she doesn’t want this. Before the fear can swallow her up.

Ned, faithful friend that he is, follows her step by step.

“I’m doing this with or without you. Either, help me or get out.”

She can’t do it without him. They both know this. But she’s stubborn enough to do it anyways, even if it gets her killed.

…

“I-I’ll do it.”

Michelle can’t help the nervous grin that blooms on her face as Ned takes a hold of the sash wrapped around her waist, slowly threading in the pins.

“Okay.” _It’ll be okay._

“You can’t come with me,” she insists, when everything is finally done and ready. Ned protests, but she shuts him down. It’s too risky, him coming would only give them more potential leverage against them.

She has to do this one alone.

“Thank you though,” she murmurs into his shirt, mindful of the weight she’s bearing. _It’s not a goodbye, not a goodbye_. Just a good luck hug.

She hopes.

Michelle slips into the abandoned warehouse, dust kicking out from under her feet. It’s dark with only a few beams of light slipping in from shattered windows to break up the otherwise completely pitch-black room. Half-emptied boxes and machinery lie scattered on the ground, with puddles of pooling water slipping in from the windows with the pitter-patter of drizzling rain outside.

Shocker—she barely restrains an instinctive eyeroll at people’s insistence on coming up with ridiculous codenames—is already there, accompanied by a handful of henchmen.

“Really? I give you one condition and you’re already blowing me off?”

“Kid,” he snorts, and she really tries not to snarl at the sheer condescension, “you really think you’re in any place to make demands?”

The warehouse trembles lightly as the sound of thrusters rocket through the air nearby. Shocker and his lackeys visibly tense and Michelle takes a steadying breath. She can do this.

Pepper Potts, _Iron Woman_, is still looking for Peter. Michelle Jones isn’t going to give up either.

She lifts the lid off the crate of energy cores, letting the alien green light spill into the room, as Shocker and his gang cock their guns at her, eyes wild.

“You little _shit_, you called the Avengers?”

Michelle just gives them a _look_.

“Are you stupid? Do you see this?” She dumps the open crate of, eh, probably four dozen or so _live explosives _on the floor, spilling threatening lights onto ground around them. The gangsters swear and back away.

“If the Avengers come busting in here, I’m just as screwed as you are. Now, if you’re done being idiots, can we get on with business?”

She has to admit, it’s really satisfying watching Shocker’s face as whatever cockiness or condescension that was there before is wiped clean. He shifts uneasily, clearly on the wrong foot.

“What do you want?”

“Spider-Man.”

A chortle of disbelief makes its way through the crowd.

“Toomes called in for a favor,” she continues heedless of their skepticism, “you don’t have to bring him, just find him. Find out where they’re keeping him, _who’s _keeping him.” 

“And, why would Toomes want anything to do with that Spider-guy?”

“Because Spider-Man saved his life. And his daughter’s life. You know the man,” she mocks an easy shrug, “guy watches out for the people who watch his family. Including you guys.”

She’s not wrong, and she knows it. And if there’s anything that she can count on, it’s that Toomes always took care of the people he considered family. Even if he was a brutal asshole, he was a good one for the people he cared for.

“And this,” Shocker motions to the spilling green lights, “is what we get for risking our necks?”

“Half of whatever Toomes had left now; half after you find him. There’s a bunch of weapons parts left behind too.” She wishes she didn’t have to bribe them to even show up.

Revulsion, disgust at herself, comes swirling up like vomit. She swallows it down.

Everything she gives them; she _knows _will end up hurting someone somewhere at some point or another. Shocker and his gang are not good people—that much is obvious. She just feels sick that it’s come to this.

For all the injustices she’d spent practically half her life lambasting, all the dirty dealings behind closed doors she’d spent days, weeks of her life protesting—when push came to shove, she is more than willing to paint her hands equally red.

But it’s the truth. Finding out the truth about yourself, finding where who you thought you were and who you _actually _are taste bitingly bitter, like blood in the mouth.

But she learns. She learns that she would do anything for her friends. Even if it meant tearing herself apart.

He doesn’t mention the suit.

He just cocks his gun at her and, just like that, there’s a room full of loaded weapons pointing at her.

“And what’s to stop us from just taking it from you now?”

She just smirks, “Why don’t you just take it from me then?” and unzips her heavy coat.

Four dozen armed energy cores strapped to her chest in a row of serially connected circuits, held together by a single pin.

A suicide vest.

More than enough firepower to level multiple city blocks, maybe even half of Queens. She hopes not, but it’s hard to tell with these things.

Shocker just _laughs_.

“Holy shit, girl. I see why Toomes likes you. You’ve got the biggest, brassiest balls I’ve ever seen.”

“Get out of here,” he says, waving her off, “we’ll look for the spider. I’ll call you if we get anything.”

She tries not to let herself shudder in relief.

*

It’s nearly midnight, two days later when it happens. The sounds of engine thrusters and whistling metal morph into a deafening roar in the air as drones and suit after suit seem to all congregate just on the other side of downtown.

Then the explosions start.

Michelle bolts out of bed, dazed, reeling. The sky is alight in fire, a hornet’s nest of whirling suits, thruster pulses, and lasers dance in and out on the horizon. And above it all—

“Holy shit—!”

She scrambles for her phone. It’s dark, but the sudden sounds are deafening, disorienting—she’s in just her PJs, stepping out onto the balcony when Ned picks up.

“Mmmrh, wha?”

“Ned! You have to get up, are you seeing this?”

There’s a rustle of noise, then a gasp.

“Holy f—, is that, like, _Cthulhu?_” He gasps again, “stop looking at it! Michelle, you can’t look at it!”

Michelle looks up above the whirling lights and fire, the explosions and flames briefly illuminating the dark shadowy pillars, no, _tentacles _reaching into the heavens as far as the eye can see, disappearing into the clouds as they broke through the cloud barrier, towering even above the nearby skyscrapers. Thousands of lights like stars blazed in the horizon, slowly tilting in closer towards earth.

A beat.

“I don’t feel like I’m going insane just by looking at it, Ned.”

“Oh. Uh. Nevermind then.”

The apartment building trembles underneath her feet and she ducks to cover her ears from the earsplitting sound of thrusters as another wave of Iron Suits rocket in overhead at low altitude, headed straight for the _thing_, whatever that was.

It clicks.

The lights on the horizon. Pepper Potts was bringing in the _armada_. Her neighborhood was turning into a warzone.

“I have to go, Ned!”

She rushes back inside, blowing through her room to grab her things and slip into sneakers.

“MOM!” she yells at the top of her lungs as she bursts into her mom’s room, “MOM, WE HAVE TO—"

She’s not there. The sheets are messily scattered on an empty bed. Michelle thumbs for her phone, but her mother’s phone goes straight to voicemail.

Mom must’ve been called out for an emergency shift.

Swearing, she rushes to the front door to check the key rack. She can’t drive, but anything is better than staying _here_.

She swears again.

_Of course_, the keys are gone, mom rarely got a ride from her nurse friends for emergency shifts—she always—

She’s trapped, Michelle realizes. If she wants to get out, she’ll have to get out on foot. She could call Ned, but that would be asking his family to drive _into _the warzone.

No. No way.

The sound of explosions shakes the building as Michelle races down the hall, pausing just long enough to pull the fire alarm. Doors start bursting open as other residents, shaken by the vicious fighting going on outside, start evacuating, crowding the stairwells in a stampede of frightened bodies. It’s a nightmarish mess, people trampling over one another in a hurry to get out, children crying as people tumbled over the stairs.

As she rounds the third-floor stairwell, ahead of most of the crowd, but still crammed in like sardines—a dark, hulking giant of a man muscles his way _up _the stairs, swimming up the current of people. She has just a second to blink at him to realize— 

“SHELLEY!” Marcus yells over the din of tromping feet, “Where’s your mother?”

_None of your business_, she wants to scream back, but now is not the time—“She’s not home! I think she’s at the hospital!” Michelle yells instead, and Marcus nods and she yelps when he _hefts _her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and starts piling down the stairs.

Freaking Marcus. She wants to kick him in the face, but hoisted over shoulder, her shoes are already too busy catching other people’s faces. She bites out half of an apology when her shoes smush against some white dudebro’s face, until she sees the tattoo of a swastika peeking out from his undershirt.

She kicks him in the face again, just for good measure.

It turns out that the ground floor lobby is already crowded with people struggling to get the apartment shutters open. So, Marcus just swims back up the stairs, punches out the window in the second-floor hallway, and heaves her over the windowsill, directly into an open dumpster.

It’s gross, wet, and filthy, but she’s never been gladder simply to be _alive_. The sounds of explosions and fighting are getting _louder_, more desperate—and there’s an ear-splitting _keening _with every gunshot and thruster blast. 

“Come on, we have to go!”

Marcus’ old black pickup roars to life as it climbs the curb.

“Get in, get in!”

She shakes her head, guilt like cold fingers tapping down her spine,

“We can’t leave them trapped inside!”

“They’ll be fine, look!”

Police sirens call shrilly from down the block, blue and red lights spiraling, lighting up the streets like disco night; there’s a group of firefighters heaving the shutters open, as a wave of panicking tenants come streaming out.

She climbs in just as a long, dark tendril comes sweeping across the buildings overhead, pulverizing the neighboring apartment complex. Brick and concrete come tumbling down, dust and glass shards—Iron Suits appear in a flurry of blazing lights, firing down upon it— the engine rattles and cabin shakes as they drive under the arching tendril and the rain of heavy laser fire into the street across.

Marcus swerves the truck left; a bright white energy beam cleaves deep grooves into the street as it swerves up to cleanly slices another tendril in two—leaving it to disintegrate, filling the air with…dust?

No, Michelle realizes, it’s _sand_.

The skies are heavy and buzzing with a dark cloud of sand, as if in the middle of a vicious sandstorm. Adding the cover of night, the streets are almost impossible to see—she watches as Marcus flips on the high beams and has to turn them back off. There’s so much particulate in the air, the high beams do more harm than good.

It’s _loud_, and noisy—police sirens are everywhere, megaphones blaring as loud as possible, as the sounds of the clashing titans only grow above.

_ALL RESIDENTS MUST EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. ALL RESIDENTS MUST EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY. THIS IS NOT A DRILL._

The street ahead of them suddenly _blooms _in a dark cloud of sand, tendrils reaching out, twisting like blender blades, eviscerating the buildings on either side. Michelle grips the car door, feeling her stomach jump to her throat, as Marcus swears heavily and spins the car around in a dizzying turn.

A pair of Iron Suits flies in from the sky overhead and release a wave of bright, concussive energy—she watches as the tendrils get blasted apart into shards of molten glass, shattering lifelessly onto asphalt.

It’s a tense, rollercoaster of a ride through the neighborhood as the cabin tips from side to side as they cut around corners of blasted out streets and molten asphalt. They dodge around a firestorm of multiple simultaneous firefights breaking out all over the neighborhood, as the _thing _seems to be spreading further and further—with the Iron Suits struggling to contain it. 

But eventually the rumble of collapsing concrete and smashed glass subsides as they pull ahead of the spreading chaos. Michelle finds herself clutching the door handles in a death grip and has to pry her hands free.

“Where, where are we going?”

“To the hospital, where your mother is,” he says, keeping his eyes steady on the road, but there’s no avoiding the clench in his voice, and in hers.

“No offense, but I think she was pretty _clear—"_

“Shelle. I think this is more important.”

Something about talking, talking to her _father_, in the midst of the chaos they’d just left, that makes her feel small. Like she’s five again, feet dangling from the kitchen stool, looking helplessly at her parents with blurry eyes—wondering when home turned so _mean_.

She scuffs her vans, still wet and a little smelly, beneath the dashboard.

“I just, I just don’t think it’ll help, dad,” she admits quietly, feeling out the word gingerly, “you can’t just barge in like that whenever you want.”

_Not after leaving whenever you wanted, _goes unsaid, but they both hear it.

There’s hurt and there’s bitterness. But more than all of that, there’s just _yearning_, yearning to be _whole _again.

The cabin is quiet as they cruise down the city lanes; in the peaceful cover of night, the streets are deceptively quiet, such a stark contrast to the carnage they’d just left behind that she wonders if it was all just a bad dream.

“I just want to check in on your mother. Make sure she’s safe.” He says, breaking the wounded silence, “I know that I didn’t—that she doesn’t want to see me now. But. Well, maybe, you could just check in on her?”

“For the both of us, I mean,” he quickly amends, when she doesn’t reply immediately.

“Yeah. I could do that.”

From the corner of her eyes, she sees him turn to look at her, a sad smile taking hold over his aged face—older than she remembers, just like her mom. She wonders what happened in the years she was gone, if they’d spoken at all since before.

“Did you—did you and mom—LOOK OUT!” She screams and ducks her head as two cars come careening out of the darkness, running the red light at the intersection they’d just passed. The dark sedan clips the back side of truck, sending it into a tailspin; the world becomes a whirling blur around them as Michelle feels dinner come back up to say hello.

When Marcus finally regains control, she sees the other car, a gray unmarked van on the other side of the street tipped onto its side, men piling out, long rifles in hand, raised—

Michelle ducks as the windshield caves in with a peppering of gunfire. The truck roars in reverse, tires squeaking as Marcus wheels it around and floors the gas, and Michelle glances up as the men in the sedan _vaporize _the van and its men in an explosion of green light.

_Oh my God._

“Stinkin’ _Fisk_,” Marcus growls out over the din of explosions and wind, “what the _hell _did those sons of—“ 

Michelle bites back a delirious giggle, because _holy shit_, that was Shocker’s crew, and Fisk?

When _weird stuff _happens, like, alien tentacles bursting into the sky, no one in New York really gives it a second thought anymore. Because when you wake up already in the middle of a firefight with the Avengers, there’s no time for questions. You just _get out_.

But if ordinary criminals are involved, still engaged in turf wars? Something is definitely wrong.

Michelle looks up at the horizon, watching the writhing bands, tentacles of sand waving in the air, lit up in wreaths of glowing flames and red lasers, as they lash out against the swarming suits—crushing skyscrapers, buildings, and Iron Suits alike.

_Did I cause this?_

It’s only because she’s already staring out the window, eyes clenched against the blowing wind coming in from the shattered windshield that she sees it—she sees it as the truck climbs over the curb of a torn down fence to get around the melted slag of a burnt out car blocking the road.

Red. Red and blue.

Her heart freezes in her chest.

_“STOP THE CAR!”_

Marcus tries to ignore her, but she grabs at the wheel to force him, getting a series of swears in the process.

“_What the hell do you think—_”

_“You have to stop the car!”_

She points. His eyes follow her arm down to the charred, broken up parking lot, tracing the circle of men surrounding a prone figure—no, a man. In red and blue.

Spider-Man. _Peter._

“We have to help him,” she whispers, trembling. So _close_. He looks so _hurt. _Her stomach roils, feeling like it was spilling somewhere at her feet.

“Shelley. Get out of the car.” His voice comes out low, dangerous.

Gasoline. The overpowering smell of gasoline wafts into the air as the circle of men drop the red canisters.

Numbly, almost unconsciously, she slides out of her seat onto the ground below.

“Dad?”

“Call the cops, hurry!” he orders, tossing her his phone from the open window. She watches, stunned, as the truck swings around the narrow street, lining up for the rusted fence.

_“This is the 9-1-1 call center. What is your emergency?”_

_“We’re—we’re at 91stand Central—”_

The truck releases a thunderous roar as Marcus floors the gas pedal, and it plows straight through the rusted chain link fence—ripping it straight from the ground—and into the parking lot.

_“They have Spider-Man—!”_

The men turn suddenly, hands going for pockets—

The lot _explodes _in a flash of light and fire.

“—_PETER!”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> About a month later! Sorry about that, guys. It's been really crazy lately with work and personal life things, and I'm mostly just writing and posting at the edge of my seat. I don't have enough of a backlog to have a regular posting schedule, but that's something that I'll be working on as I'm juggling my multiple projects.
> 
> Hoping to switching to take public transportation as my normal way to get to work from now on, instead of driving, and that'll get me some extra time back to do writing and brainstorming :)
> 
> We finally got to the first part of the story! Chronologically, I mean, haha. Lots of the scenes in this chapter were what inspired me to get writing on this fic as a whole, so I'm happy to finally get it on paper.
> 
> I just wanted to say thank you so much for all of the lovely reads, bookmarks, and kudos! The encouragement and readership for this fic really is what helps keep me going :) It means a lot to me that people are enjoying the random things that come out from my crazy brain!

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to follow my Tumblr for updates!
> 
> https://curseofimmortality.tumblr.com/


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